Team Fortress 2 Patch Heralds Big Changes

Yesterday’s patch for Team Fortress 2 may have inadvertantly revealed that a lot of changes are forthcoming.The patch notes coquettishly state that the patch “Reworked the character loadout screens to support future features.”The character loadout screen in question has now gained a slot for, of all things, headgear.That’s far from everything, though. Kotaku went diving into the datafiles and dragged up all manner of weird and wonderful information.It seems that in addition to the headgear slot, there’s also “an open slot for grenades, PDAs, and buildings,” which seems odd considering the fuss that was made by Valve regarding not including grenades in Team Fortress 2 in order to prevent grenade spam.Also added was an option to delete an unlocked weapon or item – which may be linked to Diablo-style attributes altering the ways that the weapons work. Apparently, these include varying clip sizes, firing speeds, critical hits, chances to slow on hit, Ubercharge rate, and “much more.” Kotaku also report that these weapons have levels, giving weapons names like “Level 4 Medigun of X Ubercharge rate.”Of course, these are all unannounced and work-in-progress. Whether they appear or not, we’ll have to wait and see.